Second Wave

by Anne McCaffrey

  “Probably a trick of the light,” Captain Bates guessed, turning her head so that her helmet lantern danced across the undulations. The structures seemed to shift again, giving Khorii the feeling that her brain had vacated her head for a moment, then reentered her skull turned the wrong way round. Her vision blurred for a moment, as she got the sudden, maddening impression that the entire room was somehow, impossibly alive, moving around them as they walked.

  When the sensation lessened but did not pass, she wanted nothing so much as to return to the ship and fly far far away.

  Ariin and Mikaaye felt the same, she read, and Captain Bates’s glove rose to her face mask as if to steady her head so it didn’t fall off her shoulders.

  Khorii said, trying to lighten everyone’s mood, “At least I’m not seeing any blue particles in the air here.”

  “We should check those bodies you said were in the corridor,” Captain Bates said.

  “It wasn’t too far when we were here before,” Khorii said. “But the distance seems much greater because of these impediments.”

  “Right. I’ve had enough of this,” the captain said, and adjusted her boots again. “Let’s skip over this part, kids, shall we?”

  The gravity within the former hold seemed no greater than on the rest of the asteroid, and the four of them bounced to the top of the nearest wall, then jumped from one to another.

  Captain Bates’s lantern made their leaping shadows fly, swoop, and undulate grotesquely up onto the overheads and down into the hollows between the humplike structures. The sense of vertigo was still disturbing, but it lessened a little as they kept moving. Twice, when they jumped for the next prominence, it wasn’t there when they landed, and they found themselves halfway down its distant side.

  On her last hop, Khorii’s boot went through the top of the structure she landed on and stuck fast. Ariin steadied her while Mikaaye helped her extricate her foot. It came out streaked with what seemed to be a muddy mixture of the gray-brown dust of the asteroid’s surface, melted sand, and taffylike, yellowed plasglass.

  “It looks wet,” Ariin said.

  “It’s certainly gooier than it was on the other humps,” Mikaaye added.

  “Maybe it’s fresher,” Ariin said.

  “That explains how the imprints could be there, but not why they are,” Captain Bates said. “But I’m starting to form a theory.”

  “It’s the ghosts, isn’t it?” Khorii asked. She could think of no other explanation, but suddenly all that she had seen, heard, felt, theorized, or heard others theorize about the plague and its aftermath was starting to meld into a shape or shapes like those into which she’d just inserted her foot. Ariin and Mikaaye had come to the same conclusion, she could tell from the posture of their bodies even before she read their minds. Captain Bates would not be far behind.

  “How did ghosts do all this?” Captain Bates asked.

  “Digestion,” Mikaaye said.

  “Exactly,” Khorii agreed. “I think what we’re seeing is a stage in an alien life cycle. First, these organisms came as the plague virus and killed people and other organic life of certain types. Then they used some of what was left in the bodies of those they’d killed to start to form themselves, except there wasn’t enough useful matter, or perhaps their molecular structure is too loose for them to have manifested themselves as solid individuals. But I think they never intended to become entirely like their victims, although they may have randomly acquired some of their appearance or even memories. I think that’s why even though some of the shuttle was destroyed, neither the Mana nor the Federation ship, both of which held plague survivors who were also seasoned spacefarers, was seriously harmed. At some point they entered a stage when the wraithlike organisms needed to ingest inorganic material to achieve solidity. And once they do”—she looked ruefully at her foot—“they keep eating. Maybe the solid form is transitory, so it needs to keep eating to maintain mass. Once it’s overeaten, the excess may be excreted into—er—” She looked meaningfully at the goo which still held her footprint.

  “Ewww,” Captain Bates said.

  “That theory would also explain the sea monster on LoaLoaKui,” Mikaaye said. “Once the organism had evolved, it also began absorbing matter from the sea, including, of course, the poopuus it might have found. This also coincided with the seeming elimination of the plague carriers as well.”

  “But that is good!” Ariin said. “It means they are in the postplague portion of their life cycle and are no longer a danger to humans or Linyaari. If that is so, there will be no plague indicators here, and our parents can be released from quarantine.”

  “Provided there are no new organisms starting the life cycle all over again,” Captain Bates agreed. “Based on what we know so far, this theory of yours sounds plausible enough, Khorii, and explains a lot of what has happened, but I don’t think we’re safe in predicting what will happen next based on it.” She stuck out her arm, pointed forward.

  The diagram of the ship near the airlock was gone, as was the airlock, for that matter; but the corridor where Khorii had first found the bodies was just beyond.

  It had become another tube like the one through which they had entered, round and smooth but with many indentations giving the appearance that people had just stepped out of them. They saw no other signs of the hundreds of bodies that had floated amid the plague particles when Khorii and her family first boarded the Blanca.

  The miasma of death had been replaced by one of fear, and it was as thick as the matter that had trapped Khorii’s foot.

  “Whoever it is, they woke up,” Mikaaye said. “I think it’s coming from a little way down and to the left.”

  “Port,” Captain Bates corrected automatically, her word bracketed by loud huffs of breath in their earbuds. She gestured forward with her arm, and they bounced forward while their shadows capered ahead of them.

  Chapter 31

  They must have saved the ballroom for dessert,” Captain Bates said, when the tube cave segued somewhat abruptly into a portion of clearly identifiable ship’s corridor, complete with separate deck, bulkheads, and ceilings. The carpet and wall coverings were even intact as were the ornate sandblasted-glass double doors leading to the opulent room beyond.

  Khorii checked her gauges. The temperature was barely warm enough to sustain life, as was the oxygen level. “There was supposed to be a big dance,” she mused. “But when the plague broke out, people decided to board their private ships and leave. The captain killed them rather than let them spread the epidemic. So the ballroom may have been deserted.”

  “There would have been serving staff and musicians, maybe,” Captain Bates said. “Anyhow, that’s how it is on vids I’ve seen advertising the posh liners.”

  “They were still people,” Khorii said. “They probably ran out to see what all the fuss was about and got killed, too.”

  The ballroom was completely empty, however, and the vast walls, covered in what looked like blue and white marble tiles, was bare of bodies or alien structures of any kind.

  Captain Bates tried to activate the light panel on the wall inside the door, but nothing happened, which was not surprising. The power had probably been drained long ago by whatever was transforming the ship into an alien cityscape.

  They crossed the ballroom, their boots echoing against the stone. Linyaari helmets permitted the wearer to hear external sounds, though the helmet worn by Captain Bates did not. Their steps on the “digested” material had made no noticeable sound, Khorii realized. If the shifting of the stuff made any kind of noise, they had been too preoccupied by its strangeness and by the psychic alarms drawing them onward to notice.

  As they crossed the room, those alarms grew louder, until Khorii realized the distress was no longer merely in her mind, but audible.

  “Someone is crying,” she said.

  Captain Bates turned deliberately and looked into her face, her eyes widening in alarm.

  “Someone else is shushing,”
Mikaaye said.

  “It’s coming from behind that wall,” Ariin said. “There, do you see the doorway?”

  “It probably leads to the kitchens,” Captain Bates said, her breath puffing in shallow counterpoint to her words. “This would have been the large dining room when there was no party.”

  They wasted no more time in reaching the door and pushing through it. At the last moment, Captain Bates placed herself in front and held out her arms to restrain the others as she ventured into the room. At the same time, someone screamed.

  The three Linyaari trained their glow tubes on the screamer, who was huddled beneath some open counters along with several other people, two women and a dozen or so children.

  Khorii knelt and peered at them. “Do not be afraid. We will help you,” she said.

  A knife flashed in the hand of one of the women, but Captain Bates seemed to anticipate it and knocked Khorii back through the hatch with a blow of her inflated arm.

  The knife tried to cut the captain’s suit, but her boots bounced her out of range, and the knife wielder, as if exhausted by her effort, sank back against the two children tucked into the thermal blanket she clutched like a shawl and clinging to her skirts.

  “You can’t trust these people any farther than you can throw them, kids. Any farther than you can throw them under normal gravity conditions,” Captain Bates said.

  “But they are in trouble and afraid!” Mikaaye said.

  “They are pirates, and you are prey,” the captain said. “I should know. I was raised with them.”

  The woman who attacked them was coughing, and her skin had a bluish tinge.

  Khorii poked her horn through its hatch. There had to be oxygen, or these people would not be alive, but there were perhaps a dozen of them and there could not, after all of this time, be very much oxygen left anywhere aboard the Blanca. Her horn could convert the carbon monoxide back to oxygen for them as it did for her. She was amazed that there had been enough to sustain these people, but perhaps the rooms were sealed from each other, and each kept its own supply. She recalled that the Blanca’s captain had reversed the airflow in the corridors to kill her mutinous passengers and crew, but Khorii’s party had restored the oxygen when they first investigated the derelict vessel.

  Ariin and Mikaaye poked their horns out, too, and in a very short time they saw that the humans were breathing more easily.

  Captain Bates took off her helmet and looked down at the women. “So, Nisa, long time no see. Funny isn’t it, how you don’t see or even think of people in years and here in just the last week or two I’ve seen Pauli and Petit and now you and Cleda. You’ve picked a strange place to bring the kids.”

  “Asha?” Nisa rolled her eyes. “Why didn’t you say these aliens were with you? How were we supposed to know with you in that suit? How’s your mama?”

  “I dunno. You’ve probably seen her more recently than I have.”

  “You saw Pauli?”

  “Yes, he was going to shoot me, but I talked him out of it.”

  “Sure you did. Did you shoot him?”

  “No, Nisa, I didn’t. A friend of mine almost did, though. He and Petit are on another ship.”

  “Going to jail?”

  Captain Bates shrugged a big-suited shrug. “Jail doesn’t mean a lot with no Federation to enforce things. He and Petit will probably find their way home one of these days.”

  “Yeah, well, you know how Coco feels about widows and orphans,” Nisa said, and made an ugly noise while running her long and very dirty red fingernail across her neck. “I wasn’t looking for it, you know? My man’s been his first mate for twenty years. So I believed him when he told me the ghosts had damaged the ship, and he was loading us women and children into the shuttles. Only the only families he loaded were Cleda’s and mine, and the only place the shuttle had to go was this creation-forsaken rock.”

  “How did you get in here?” Captain Bates asked.

  “We were running out of fuel and oxygen—the extra canisters and our suits had somehow disappeared from the shuttle. I spotted what looked like a hatch in all that junk out there. Turned out to be the servo-hatch for the galley, and we were able to dock the shuttle. Our instruments showed that there was still some oxygen in here and that if we bundled up, we could withstand the temperature for a little while and conserve what little remained on the shuttle, so we got out. I hoped there might be some food, but if there is, none of us have found it.”

  While Captain Bates was questioning the woman, who seemed to be an old friend, about how and why she and the others had come into the Blanca’s galley, Khorii knelt to try to comfort some of the children. They ranged in age from an infant in Cleda’s arms to two kids, one in each family, Khorii guessed, close to her age or Jaya’s. Khorii wondered if the mothers, who looked close to Captain Bates’s age, had older children, had started their families late, or had been bearing young yearly. She was too unfamiliar with human family structure to know, but the children were small, and though most of them tried to look tough and even mean, they were frightened and had to have been damaged by the lack of oxygen.

  Sitting down beside them, she took one of the younger ones who had been crowded away from the mother by its siblings and pulled it into her lap, laying her horn against the child’s head and saying silly things that the child seemed to find comforting. It was very dirty and had been quite cold, so Khorii wrapped her arms around it—him, she learned when she investigated a certain squishiness in its nether regions that indicated it—he—was eliminating properly, and so must not be starving. Her horn was not quite prepared to do that sort of cleansing. Other children, seeing that she was not eating their brother, crowded closer. One started rifling her pockets. Others besieged Ariin, who protected her pockets with one hand while trying to pat heads awkwardly with the other. Mikaaye was engaged in a mock—at least on his side—battle with one of the older boys, a child of about seven.

  “Nice horsie,” said a small girl, stroking Khorii’s mane.

  In the course of all of this activity, she lost track of the conversation between Captain Bates and Nisa until the captain said, “Okay, gang, we’re going to have to get these folks back to the Mana, back through the area with no oxygen. Khorii, why don’t you and I go back for the shuttle while Ariin and Mikaaye keep the air sweet here?”

  Khorii looked up. “Either that or perhaps Jaya could bring the shuttle to us.”

  “She doesn’t know what it’s like,” Captain Bates said. “The docking bay and tubes have plenty of clearance above those whatever they ares, but I’d rather go back and make sure everything is still navigable and bring it back ourselves.”

  Khorii started to rise, and the child she had been cuddling bellowed and grabbed her horn.

  “I’ll come with you,” Ariin said, batting little hands away from her pockets and the hands of an older boy away from other areas of her shipsuit. “Khorii is busy with her little friends.”

  But as Captain Bates and Ariin headed back for the door, they heard footsteps clomping unmistakably across the marble floor toward them.

  The door flung wide and four men in shipsuits and helmets entered, then closed the door behind them. “Hah! Thought you’d take the bait!” a male voice rasped through the helmet’s speaker. “Now tell me, where is all the treasure the punk was blathering about?”

  Chapter 32

  Nisa started to stand. You’re a right bastard, Coco, she was thinking, but dared not say. Khorii sensed that the woman had not completely believed the captain would abandon the women and their children, whatever she said; but until that moment, he had not given any reason for her to think otherwise.

  Captain Bates was less circumspect in her reaction to him. “You almost suffocated the wife and kids of two of your loyal followers just to see me again, Papa Coco? I’d be touched if I weren’t so revolted.”

  Khorii looked from one to the other. She detected no family resemblance, despite Captain Bates’s addressing the man as “Pap
a.”

  His appearance was presentable, even attractive, Khorii supposed, if one were human. But the only similarity he shared with her was that his dark hair and beard, worn long, were braided and beaded in the same manner that she had braided and beaded Jaya’s, Sesseli’s, and Moonmay’s hair and Mikaaye’s, Elviiz’s, and Khorii’s manes. Petit and Pauli had also worn the same style, Khorii realized belatedly, but because their hair was so dirty and matted, she had overlooked that detail.

  “Asha! You do turn up in the strangest places, wench. Good of you to lead me to the treasure as well as bringing along a passport to more and a couple of spares.” He nodded toward the three Linyaari. “I’d no idea you were shipping with this lot or, of course, I would not have had to alarm Nisa, Cleda, and the kiddies by having them pose as families in distress. Mako, pass them the packet.”

  One of the men had been pulling a large package behind him on a tether and he reeled it in and handed it to Nisa. She opened it and two adult enviro suits and several smaller ones with collapsible plas helmets tumbled out.

  “You girls forgot those when you left,” Coco told her. “The oxygen tubes in those are full enough to get you and your broods back to the ship.”

  Ignoring the seething women, he returned his attention to Captain Bates. “If I’d known our exalted Linyaari ambassadors were being chauffeured around the galaxy by my own clan daughter, I’d simply have asked nicely if you would pretty please send us one of your new playmates, along with our absent crewmen. I see by their dos you’ve already initiated these three into our clan. I’m sure they—especially Khorii, is it, who has been here before?—won’t mind showing us to the treasure.”